Professor Levan Gigineishvili’s report

• November 12, 2022

On November 3, 2022, the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences of Georgia heard the report of Professor Levan Gigineishvili “The Dialectical Method of Ioane Petritsi and Modern Intellectual and Religious Processes in Byzantium”. The speaker noted that dialectics plays a decisive role in the philosophy of John Petritsi. Dialectics is a way of knowing the world, a kind of journey from the visible to the invisible. The ability of dialectics is an innate human ability given by God, and Petritzi calls it the “Hermes”, the hermeneutic principle. For Petritsi, this principle is the criterion of truth, and it should be used to reason about all realities, including the reality of Holy Scripture. This was obviously problematic at that time, as members of the official church could see it as a danger of giving rise to dogmatic opinions that oppose the official teaching. Petritsi talks about the persecution by these circles in his “Epilogue”.